


You're the Biggest Man in the World Now, and You're Covered in Gold

by easyforpauline



Series: an early name used for videophones [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Bathing/Washing, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Post-Battle of Azzano (Marvel), Stone Top, let's talk about sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 10:15:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18071492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easyforpauline/pseuds/easyforpauline
Summary: The nurses try to tell him Bucky oughta stay in the tent overnight with everyone else for observation, but that word makes Bucky, helplessly horizontal on the cot, tense under the hand a kneeling Steve's got on his shoulder. Steve says, "I was hoping I could keep an eye on him myself. I have medical training. And I can bring him back if I need to." Polite as can be, but again, no room to argue, though the nurses do their best to make room, glaring and listing off possible complications at every turn.In the end, Steve is Captain America.





	You're the Biggest Man in the World Now, and You're Covered in Gold

**Author's Note:**

> do i have four to five other videophones fics in progress? yes! did this fall out of me instead of any progress being made on those? you bet!

Big important movie star hotshot he may be, but Steve still wasn't given private quarters for the Italian show. Instead, he says, he bunked with Freddy, the props and costumes guy; "Feels like a week ago  _I_ was stitching up split chorus girl skirts off Broadway," accompanies a hand ghosting over Bucky's shoulder in the intent way he's been doing the whole walk, and Bucky, for a moment, lets himself sink into that not-touch, slacking his spine and smiling at Steve. Moving his face at all feels forced, but that doesn't mean there's no truth to it.

Then comes the  _oofthunkslurp_  of someone's knees buckling and a body hitting the mud, so there's that to attend to instead of memories and not-touches.

But thank god for all that bonding over the theatrical seamstress life Steve and Freddy must have done, 'cause soon after they're there— _there_ , not a place with any significance beyond the journey's end but so fucking sweet for being that much, at least—Freddy ambles over and lets Steve know he'll be shacking up with the main Hitler and the understudy Hitler tonight.

"Oughta let you get some peace and solitude, after all the uhhh. Anyway, whole time thinking you were probably dead I got my sufficient share of the place. We'll just fish up a bedroll." No ghostliness to the gesture, he smacks a hand to Steve's shoulder, and exits stage left, pursued by Bucky's eyes.

Freddy's not much bigger than Steve used to be. Strides with less certainty and talks with an Italian Jersey accent thick as rhetorical thieves, but he's slight and sharp. For a moment Bucky wonders if Steve pulled some kinda body-swapping stunt right out of  _Tales of the Weird_.

Then he looks up at Steve. At the flop of yellow hair and the way his bushy brows and perfect eyes all try squeezing up into the center of his face with love and concern. That's Bucky's guy, all right, give or take twenty bowling balls and an eight-pack. Even more obvious when he says, "Come on," with no room for argument, and hooks an arm around Bucky's neck in a perfect Bucky imitation. "Medical."

Apologies to Freddy—It's obvious to anyone with their head in this dimension that Steve's got no intention of using his private quarters for peace and solitude. The nurses try to tell him Bucky oughta stay in the tent overnight with everyone else for observation, but that word makes Bucky, helplessly horizontal on the cot, tense under the hand a kneeling Steve's got on his shoulder. Steve says, "I was hoping I could keep an eye on him myself. I have medical training. And I can bring him back if I need to." Polite as can be, but again, no room to argue, though the nurses do their best to make room, glaring and listing off possible complications at every turn.

It's not a lie  _exactly_  that Steve's got medical training. He'd always been after his ma to tell him everything she knew, to explain what was happening when she patched him up. Always badgered every doctor to explain in detail exact as their scalpels how and why they were treating him. Always wanted to know how to tend to a body, how to fix its aches. And he'd acted as a makeshift medic at protests a time or two while Bucky nervously hovered nearby, keeping watch over this little guy keeping watch over the rest of them, ready if a cop or scab threw a club or an elbow that needed more care than just shaking off.

In the end, Steve is Captain America. And now that means something beyond high-kicks and the comic books they'd been receiving on the front alongside shiny paperbacks of  _The Grapes of Wrath_  and  _Frankenstein_ until Hell broke even looser. So the nice ladies yield, and when Steve's 100% finished all debriefings, all dressing-downs followed by accolades, Bucky's steered by a hand at the small of his back to a room that's not big or ritzy but boasts its own attached bathroom with a shower and toilet. If you wanna call them that, barely more than a dangling hose and a hole in the ground topped with some kid's very first project for Wood Shop, B-minus work at best. They'll do.

Someone saw fit to construct an extra special extra large cot for their superhuman star. Next to Freddy's cot, it looks almost like a real bed. No doubt Freddy'd been indulging in the elbow (and ankle, and head, and et cetera) room while Steve was absent; at least he left it all made-up with its blue and white striped bedding.

Steve guides Bucky to sit on it, but Bucky makes room to argue where the nurses couldn't, halting. Surprised by how well he matches Steve's strength. Not that he needs to for long, because Steve stops pushing the second he feels resistance, though his hands stay where they are, one at the small of Bucky's back, the other circling his bicep.

Both thumbs swipe soothingly over Bucky's skin through the stiff layer of his shirt. The drag of it on similarly dirt-stiff skin makes him wince. "Honey?"

"Don't wanna get the bed dirty. Sorry."

"Right. No sorry." So instead of letting the bed take Bucky's weight, he takes it all himself, tipping Bucky back, wrapping arms around him, resting his chin on the top of Bucky's head. It's as sharp as ever, comforting. " Let's get you out of these disgusting things." More comforting than the windshield wiper swish of his thumbs from before, he pinches Bucky's stomach through his shirt, and Bucky surprises himself with a squeal. "We'll shower. How's that?" He turns Bucky around, holding him as close as he can while still able to search his face, hands reassuring manacles over the crooks of Bucky's elbows. 

How's that.

The thing is, he pissed himself. He's pretty sure he  _shit_  himself, maybe more than once. His body must be covered in puncture wounds, in scarring or scabbing cuts, an ugly angry tapestry. And even if that weren't all true, he's fully lost count of how long since he last bathed. There are memories, no matter how hard his brain's trying to tamp a lid on them, of the little German doctor undoing his pants, cutting off his soiled shorts, wiping him down thank-God perfunctorily. So it's not like he spent the march here shit-smeared as an angry monkey's habitat after the zookeeper's dropped dead, but he still knows—can feel—that his various crevices and so forth sure ain't looking pretty.

Steve must know that. From logic and from smelling him. They slept so close the past few nights he himself could've been called Bucky's dirty clothes. Therefore it can't be that hard for him to decipher the reason for the dumbstruck, trapped look on Bucky's face, his lack of an answer.

Steve shoves past all that, raising an eyebrow the way he does when he's not interested in being disobeyed. "You remember that flu that knocked me on my ass four years ago?"

"You'll have to be more specific." He smiles at the cuff he earns to the back of the head, even sheep-soft as it is. "Yeah, I know which you mean."

"So think about that."

"I'd rather not, thanks."

Steve huffs. "Smart aleck. Think about how we're even. Now come on, in the shower," and same as his eyebrow, his tone says he's never even heard of the concept of disobedience.

Before actually letting him in, though, Steve tests the temperature, holding his wrist thoughtfully under the spray and biting his lip just short of hard enough to bleed as he fiddles with the knobs. Like they're in the goddamn Waldorf-Astoria, like they aren't just lucky the water's not coming out mud. It's sweet. When he thinks he's got it right, he directs Bucky to stick his wrist under too, and it feels like water. That's plenty.

He swallows down the sudden, nervous lump in his throat and nods, and gets to the hard part, moving to tug his shirt off, but Steve intercepts him. He strips Bucky quickly, years of expertise, except when his undershirt sticks to a patch of dried blood, and Bucky winces at the pull on his skin. Then he slides careful, damp fingers between the fabric and the bloody skin, worrying at the area until the shirt can pop loose.

"Did this in the wrong order, dummy," Bucky whispers. "Water'll get cold."

"Shit, sorry."

"No sorry," Bucky echoes to earn a small smile. "'s fine. Just faster if we each did ourselves." But Steve's already shucking Bucky of his pants, and there's—something, in his eyes, at the sight of how Bucky's got no underthings, something wild and afraid. He squashes it down, and moves onto himself, leaving Bucky propped naked against a wall as he speeds through peeling off the uniform until finally he can drag both of their exposed, stinking, battered bodies under the spray.

A grey, utilitarian bar of soap marinates in its own slime on a two-by-four nailed to the wall. Next to it, a similarly grey washcloth looks like it oughta be mildewing. Not much different than how Steve would have it were they at home with real, lovely, hygienic options, the fucking nut. But right now it's like the Atlantic flooding into the Sahara, and Bucky almost moans at the sight of Steve sudsing up the washcloth. Does moan at the first touch of the soapy gross thing to his chest, one-fourth disgust but the rest of the sound pure relief.

That earns him a smile too. A, "Good boy," with an almost-audible  _good toy_  thrumming underneath it. "Lemme do this."

There's nothing specifically erotic about it. Steve keeps his touch—not detached, too attentive for that, but—brisk enough that it's clear all he wants is Bucky clean. But that's maybe more erotic than anything, Steve taking care of his property how Bucky takes—took—care of his rifle. It's only the grace of God and a complete absence of energy for anything but remaining vaguely vertical that they don't have the distraction of a raging erection on their hands. There's nothing like that to distract him from staring at the naked, strange body in front of him.

This is the first time he's known for sure that Steve's really this now. It's not armor, not fifty layers of woolen sweaters and little stilts to top it off. Nothing to peel away so you can reach his before-Steve underneath it all, his Steve he left at home, teeny and spiky as an unshucked chestnut. Nowhere on his skin is there a little latch or keyhole for getting in, and on top of that—

"Your scars are gone," he mutters, surprised that it comes out audible.

"They are." He sounds so nonchalant about it, the asshole. "Scars, freckles, moles. The birthmark stayed—Wasn't sure until my first time alone with a full-length mirror." It had been just above his ass, the splotch like a leopard's spot. Bucky cranes his neck a little and Steve indulges him by turning just enough that the birthmark is visible. He turns back when Bucky nods. "I've still got a belly button even though that's a scar—Stark couldn't explain, or something about how early I got it—but—Yeah. I'm all shiny and new."

"Behind your ear from that glass bottle couple years ago. The stitches."

"Gone." He looks pleased, and Bucky has to swallow hard. The sense of loss is so big that he can't give a shit when that horrible grey soap starts working through his hair.

"The jagged one on your palm, and. Shit. Your shoulder, and, fuck—" The one by his heart—

"Yeah, they're—Buck, hey, I'm still me. I promise. Look." He pauses shampooing and takes Bucky's hand, maneuvering him like a puppet, stroking one finger down the ridge of Steve's nose. "Didn't fix this, right? Even if it had: We're both here. That's what matters. My scars don't need to be here too."

Bucky nods mutely.

"Yes?"

Bucky nods again, and Steve doesn't push him for verbal. Bucky can't decide if he's grateful or disappointed. 

"That's right," Steve says, "We're good," and as he tips Bucky's head back, works the shampoo out with his strong, long fingers, same as they've always been, he whistles without specific tune. Almost inaudible

For the whistling and for unchanged fingers, he's grateful. Bucky closes his eyes. The shower spits all over his face. Grateful. And that's it for a long time, Steve's hands and the scratch of the cloth and the increasing chill of the shower the only things he knows. When Steve kneels down to get his ankles, his feet, the backs of his knees, Bucky tucks his chin close to his chest and opens his eyes.

The vertigo he's been feeling in the face of a massive lump of Steve dissipates, leaving him with that other, worn-soft impression of Steve's enormity. How he's always felt at the sight of Steve kneeling before him. To tie his shoes together. To fasten his roller skates. To bind his ankles or kiss the bruises blooming on his knees from kneeling all afternoon or to strip him and put him to bed when he's too drunk or plum-exhausted to manage himself. Bucky's a leaf thin as butter melted in the pan and Steve's an ant that can lift five-thousand times its own weight, protected by his shadow and carrying him home.

Then Steve stands, and the vertigo returns, but this time there's a comforting edge, the idea that being dizzy means being free to sway into Steve's bulk, to be held up under someone else's safe weight. He does sway. Steve smiles, indulgent. Holds him up.

"Come on. You're all clean, bud. Out the shower." He smacks Bucky on the ass, and it's more sound than anything, echoey in the bathroom, but blessedly there's still some sting thanks to the wet skin. Bucky gives a delighted little yelp, feeling like he's forcing it even though he isn't, and tries not to think about how much Steve must be holding back to get that kind of sting and not more.

His glossy hard-shelled sweetheart can lift five-thousand times his own weight, build cities out of sandboxes, and shift and mutate endlessly to meet Bucky where he's at.

 

He swims so much in Steve's clothes that if he actually went swimming in them, the waves would strip him naked in half a second flat. That's a thought that would get him hard on a better day. It does make him feel even more like a carried leaf, at least.

The look that Steve gives him when he's done dressing is approving, possessive, followed by a nip to his earlobe and two warm hands at his hips, pressing the thermal shirt tight against his skin. Bucky hums, still not quiet able to get it up, but contemplating asking Steve to actually lift him over his head. Maybe that's how he'll take him to bed. Maybe that's how he'll take him far, far away from here.

 

In bed, no longer afraid of ruining the bedclothes, the two of them dressed in warm, clean things, reading or pretending to read the books Steve had stacked by the bed, legs slotted together, it should be easier to pretend the Steve he left at home is underneath there, wrapped in sweaters and propped up on stilts. Playing a funny game, acting a part. But there's no going back. Not after what he saw in the shower, that big and umblemished body. And it's been a long time now since Bucky's been any good at pretending. That absence of imagination hurts like a bullet's graze and he should know. What he sees is what he gets.

Like it's grasping for something, anything, to fret over that isn't life and death and little shiny round glasses and how his body  _wasn't_  all scarred and scabbed in the shower the way it should have been, Bucky's brain won't stop asking if maybe the future holds  _seeing_  more, if his life now will be  _getting_  what he sees.  

The smart part of him knows that Steve's never said anything to indicate that self-consciousness has got a thing to do with the lack of participation from Steve's dick in their sex life.  _It's neat that I can make you do stuff_ , he'd said once,  _stuff_  meaning come, or cry, or bruise, or stand in the corner with a dunce cap, or somersault across the floor while Steve cracks up watching. Steve likes it as much as Bucky does, just likes it different.

He's  _monologued_  on the topic, and, "I hate this fucking body," hasn't slipped into the monologue once, even if it has featured in the occasional monologue on other topics, like needing a stepladder to reach the kitchen cabinets.

That particular train of thought's been cut short a time or ten by Bucky getting on all fours to be the stepladder.

So there's no reason Steve becoming Atlas in the flesh instead of just in the spirit should change anything, but. What if. This is all Bucky's imagination is good for now; the starkly terrified what if.

He dog-ears the last page he pretended to read, too worn, for once, to care about finding a bookmark, and places the book down between them. Steve doesn't even ask questions, just dog-ears his own, and Bucky, the hypocrite, feels old, warm annoyance at  _him_  for not finding a bookmark instead. Their books look cozy stacked atop one another. He gets the full force of Steve's face turned toward his.

Candlelight from the nightstand cuts that forceful face into sharp chiaroscuro swoops and planes, comfortingly stern and simple. The sight loosens the knot of Bucky's terrified tongue, allowing him to ask what could possibly be the dumbest thing he's ever asked, and that includes asking Steve once when they were nine if being really lightweight meant he could fly. "Do you want me to, y'know?"

The mockery in Steve's voice is gentle. Just the lightest tug of a pigtail. "What, balance my checkbook? They got accountants for that now." His hand moves to cup Bucky's skull and does, in fact, tug lightly at one of the longer sections of his hair.

Bucky grunts. No use pussyfooting. "Do you wanna stick it in me?"

"Oh. It? Like?" Steve gestures at his general crotch area.

"No, the Eiffel tower. Yeah, your—" He mimics the gesture.

"Not. Really? Why?"

"I dunno. You're—It's. Bigger now."

Steve furrows his brow and pushes himself up on an elbow. "Yeah. What's that gotta do with anything? Oh. Does that make you want me to—"

"It's still smaller than the rolling pin, Steve; don't flatter yourself."

"Yeah, it is, isn't it?" He sounds proud, like how big an object he can make Bucky take is more relevant to his sexual prowess than the size of his dick, which, okay, fair enough, and okay, he loves Steve so fucking much. "Okay, so then...?"

"I'm just saying, if you wanted to, I'd understand." He knows he doesn't sound the most enthusiastic. It's not that he feels fully sure it would be  _bad_. It would just be. Weird. New. When so much is weird and new already. There's no way to say for sure how Steve would move, or act, or who they'd be with each other. He can't look Steve dead-on for this after all, turning his face into the pillow.

"Okay. No. I'm fine. I'm—Bucky. I mean it, all right? I'm still me. Right?"

"Yeah." His voice is muffled.

"No." And then Steve's grip is hard on his jaw, forcing him to face Steve. "Bucky. Look at me."

Bucky manages the eye contact. Scrapes the effort from the bottom of his mental-emotional bucket. Steve's eyes are small and hard as ants. In them: anger, but not at Bucky. Anger at something lurking just over Bucky's shoulder. "I'm still me. Do you understand?" Bucky nods. "Verbally, please."

"Yes, Steve."

"Say it."

"You're still you, Steve."

Steve releases him. Kisses him on the forehead. "My good toy." A huff of breath over his kissed skin. "My good man. I am. And you're still you, all right? Everything's the same. It's just—"

"A fucking backward circus, yeah."

"Yeah, pal. Exactly. Upside-down on unicycles."

"Trampled by elephants."

"Yeah." The kind of pause he hasn't heard since they were just kids, really, and then—"You want me to trample on you?" The idiocy on this kid, thinking that needed a nervous pause.

"Maybe later. Costume's dumb as hell, but I do like the boots." He likes the whole costume, actually, but that doesn't make it not dumb.

"You want something else?" The tone should be suggestive. Instead, he sounds like he'd accept, _Five-course breakfast with champagne, and don't forget powdered sugar on my pancakes_ , as an answer. Like he'd rush right out to do his best to satisfy that hunger.

But the half a C-ration Bucky wolfed down upon returning was sufficient for now. Even that had him looking distended; his stomach's shrunken to an acorn. So he says, "Just. Hold me, okay? Big spoon me, Popeye."

"Aye aye," Steve says, and Bucky coaxes Steve into telling him about the cities where he performed. Already got a taste of that on the march, but now they're on Des Moines, and Steve's saying, "Asked the stage manager where all the corn fields were and he had the nerve to point me to the popcorn stand in the lobby."

He's shaken awake, and his body tenses, but the smell's too familiar for him to thrash or kick out or start chanting his own name and number. Why is Steve's  _smell_  familiar? Why's Bucky's brain and body think he's a bloodhound now?

"You were whimpering," Steve says, the yawn underneath barely stifled.

Bucky lets his own yawn roam free. Yeah. Of course he was whimpering. And thank god nothing remains except the impression of  _of course he was whimpering_  and the smell of burning skin. He's got Steve's smell now to override that. A baffling blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. "Yeah."

"I won't ask if you're good, but—"

"Thanks for waking me."

"Actually. I don't know if I should fall asleep holding you. I've practiced with my strength when I'm awake. Maybe I've woken up having torn my pillow in half a time or two."

"In  _half_? So particular of you."

Steve snorts. "Shut up. But I don't want to crack your ribs. That's all."

"Okay. Then I guess. Let's switch. I'll hold you." Steve's pause goes on too long. "Is that okay?"

"Yeah, of course. But is that enough for you?"

"Yeah, Steve, you're enough for me," and instead of bitching that that's not what he meant, Steve's pause goes on a while too, and finally, his soft voice says, "Mutual."

Then, "Okay. Climb on back there." His arms lift like the bar on the Cyclone when it's finally slid to a full stop. Bucky twists, raises up on his arms and yawns again, taking a moment to crack his back, a moment to be luxurious as a cat ignoring its filthy-alley circumstances, before picking his way over Steve's unscarred body to spread out at his back.

They didn't used to do this much, Steve sometimes complaining that the weight of Bucky's arm draped over his chest made it harder to breathe. But Bucky finds he likes plastering himself to this solid wall, knowing that he's got Steve's six and also that he's got Steve's  _six foot whatever_  of mass to hide behind. Likes how when he drapes an arm over Steve's ribs—hidden beneath the padding of muscle, now—he can feel a newly slow heartbeat. Its steady march.

What he likes most is how Steve says, "There we go. My little parachute pack."

Bucky's face grows warm. He says, "Yeah, I got you." And that doesn't mean Steve's safe. Bucky's learned that the hard way, his own impotence, own easiness to break. But Steve is safe. He's got this heartbeat; he's got these big hot air balloon lungs. Most important, he's always got this bone-deep ability, born-and-bred ability, to be the immovable object and unstoppable force at once.

He's got all that. Bucky's got him. Clings a little tighter, tight as he can.

 

**Author's Note:**

> the tabs of research i opened up to consult about what steve's lodgings would be like on tour in europe as part of a uso show? they were never consulted. mcu stands for Much Consulting is Undone. we play fast and loose here.


End file.
